Managing change in a complex environment? TOGAF® enables your business to get the best from its People, IT and Technology infrastructure, taking you from where you are NOW to where you need to be. EA Dynamics UK supports a holistic approach to Enterprise Architecture.

Blog Entries: May, 2013

How good is your knowledge of the different types and purpose of the Archimate Diagrams? This multiple choice quiz tests your knowledge of the Archimate diagram purpose. If you are studying for the Archimate certification then it is just extra practice to test what you have learnt.

One of the fundamental strengths of enterprise architecture is the management of the EA across the global enterprise – both in the breadth of coverage – geographically and agreement of functional scope included in the transformation along with the hierarchical coverage – Strategic, operational and granular project level. At the top level the level of detail and is broad and strategic. Here the goals, drivers and direction setting of the business are formed. When looking at how this affects the overall business transformation often the balanced scorecard can help to identify the high level goals, drivers and objectives that are relevant to the transformation. The enterprise architects can then derive a high level set of principles to help guide the projects as they develop the solutions. The goals, drivers, scope and principles can be stated in a projects request For Architecture Work giving the project visibility of Why this solution is being developed. During the vision phase the project has the opportunity to validate the scope, objectives, constraints and principles.

Archimate is a recognised Open Technical Standard from the Open Group related to enterprise architecture modelling - it includes defined language to support descriptions, analysis and visualisation of architecture within and across the enterprise architecture domains with a clear and defined method.

The level of detail between the views is tailored at various stakeholder groups. High Level Views found in the motivational extension for example, includes linking goals, drivers and functionality to the requirements and business layer helping to ensure a business driven approach is applied to the solution.

The flexibility of the layered view give individual stakeholders a bird’s eye view of the target model whilst other supporting view then models the various sub elements making up the various domains and with defined structure showing how the various domains inter-relate. Therefore Archimate builds a model that responds to the various stakeholder’s requirements and perspectives, without the granular detail required to develop detailed code such as UML.

The Archimate view does not delve into the detailed modelling utilised by software developers who model in more granular detail, but Archimate sits above this layer – enabling a more cohesive view of the landscape rather than the traditional silo’ed approach. The UML modelling provides more detailed software related views, thus complementing the modelling analysis, enabling a broader, shallower analysis of the landscape giving the overall 'big picture' and the baseline and target model states and planned increments.

Archimate does include the essential components in each domain layer – both the active, passive and behavioural aspects within each layer. Archimate also differentiates between the external and internal view elements of the system, including the use of interfaces as the defined point of access.

Archimate complements TOGAF framework well and the course shows various examples of the analysis done in the various Architecture Development Method (ADM) phases. The Archimate course gives users the opportunity to take a case study and work through the various ADM phases to develop a clear picture of how enterprise architecture can be practically applied and provide the information necessary to successfully transform the business to an agreed target state.

A new article focused on managing the EA landscape and focusing on business value, risk, managing costs and innovation across the EA landscape can be found on the following link.

Has your business effective insight into the enterprise landscape? Do you have sufficient insight into the number and types of applications, and understand their purpose and contribution to business margin? Is there visibility and transparency of where each application is used, what data it accesses and the technologies the applications usage?

Build and embrace a dashboard and reporting system which will help you monitor and measure key metrics

TOGAF is The Open Group Architecture Framework, which is basically a framework or a set of methods for effective enterprise architecture, providing a comprehensive approach for the design, planning, implementation and governance of an enterprise’s information architecture. Why is TOGAF certification important and how can it be adapted to your business?

Advantages Of Changing Business Processes With TOGAF

The main advantage of having TOGAF certification is the knowledge of how systems related to businesses actually work. TOGAF is a great way of ‘demystifying’ architecture development of enterprises, and another great feature is that with TOGAF knowledge you will be able to align IT to develop business capabilities.

For businesses TOGAF provides practical and effective methods to develop enterprise architecture. Why is it important? One of the main points is that well-documented and well-understood enterprise architecture enables the company to respond quickly to changes in the environment where the company is operating. Also, having TOGAF certification for a business will also help to ensure that the central components of the company continue to operate smoothly through the changes.

"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes" - Peter F. Drucker

Complete Transparency Of Business With TOGAF Certification

After taking part in the exams to get a TOGAF certification, you will notice that your company will harvest great benefits from implementing the enterprise architecture. Organic approaches to business mean it’s responding to the changing environment instead of ignoring it, therefore with TOGAF and TOGAF certification you can be sure that maximum transparency of all your internal functions are completely clear and the best ways of achieving business goals are now comprehensively explained; taking into account guiding principles, organisation structure, business processes, people or stakeholders, applications, data and infrastructure and technologies upon which networks and systems are built.

When a business fails to achieve what it has set out to do, one contributor may be internal problems related to the core of the business activities and functions; as well as badly understood interactions with other departments coupled with poorly defined responsibilities. Frequently, all kinds of businesses ignore the obvious change in their environment and experience very slow growth or none at all. To improve business performance, why not ensure the relevant roles within the organisation obtain TOGAF certification.This will enable the business to understand and utilise proven best practice to support organisational change and transformation.

TOGAF Certification For Effective And Efficient Organisational Change

Larger global businesses or business enterprises sometimes get caught up in their functions the processes that support operations become fragmented and inefficient, which results in internal chaos. TOGAF certification will provide you with the framework, tools and skillsets needed to develop enterprise architecture, allowing you to review what each and every department is doing, addressing the problems based on mission criticality and business drivers.

After analysis, design and implementation successful organisational change is realised by ensuring the stated benefits are tracked to ensure the outcomes are successfully achieved. The proven enterprise architecture approach will allow you to lower your business operation and management costs, have a more agile organisation with a more flexible workforce and improve your business productivity.

Numerous Benefits Of TOGAF Certification For Your Business

Other key benefits include more efficient IT operations with reduced complexity in business and IT, lower costs in software development, support and maintenance. Organisation has proven that project development timescales have reduced from 9 months to 3 months by utilising and managing their assets as reusable building blocks and design patterns.This approach has helped to reduce timescales by ‘Design once, use many times’ approach.

As well as this, TOGAF can help your business achieve more clarity in the core activities and goals which, after each function of each business unit is streamlined, resulting in smoother operations and increased adaptability to the changing environment, together with the lowered costs in all departments.

Tactical, short term projects that focus on immediate problems in one operational area often result in fragmented, duplicated landscape.The broader, more strategic analysis of the landscape help to ensure license costs, functionality and capabilities are optimised, enabling the business to concentrate on achieving their business goals, not fire fighting and wrestling with out of date, legacy systems.

With EA Dynamics UK your team will be trained on TOGAF and given insight into the techniques, methodologies and tools essential in enterprise architecture. With our workshops and exercises your delegates will understand the theory and be confident to apply it in their companies and organisations.

Open Group Certification logo is a trademark and TOGAF is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. TOGAF® 9 Practitioner Certification Training Level 1 and 2 is an Accredited TOGAF 9 Training Course and complies with the accreditation requirements for The Open Group TOGAF Certification for People program